Aug 17 2017








Contents of part 3





 e.     From social liberalism to populism




i.       We are living through a period of unprecedented global crisis – political, economic, social, and cultural. This means that ideas will be tested continuously. A democratic party based on the exploited and oppressed will have people from a whole number of tendencies – communist (as outlined in 2.f.iii), republican socialist, social democratic, movementist, green socialist, socialist feminist, environmental, etc.




v.         It is not surprising that today’s social democracy has deep roots, particularly in a long-standing state like the UK, which once dominated the world economy, and hence for a long period was more shielded from the effects of crisis than more peripheral, imperially dominated countries. This meant the British ruling class could make concessions to its working class. Due the conservative nature of the UK state though, such concessions were only made after considerable political pressure. And these concessions were made in return for ‘lower orders’ acceptance of the UK state and its continued British imperial policies.


vii.       However today, such is the threat from continued economic recession, environmental degradation, and nuclear and other forms of warfare, that for Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Barbarism’, the independent marxist, the late Istvan Mezsaros has substituted ‘Barbarism or Worse’. We have entered another period of imperialist crisis, and as during previous crises, social democracy will be found wanting.



i.          Before examining more contemporary events, it is necessary to go back much further and understand the changes in the meaning of social democracy. In the lead up to the 1847-9 International Revolutionary Wave, democracy was understood as being based on the principle of the sovereignty of the people expressed in a republican constitution. Thus democracy and republicanism were closely linked revolutionary ideas. This is why people saw that the struggle to attain popular sovereignty needed to be achieved by revolutionary democratic means. There were already divisions over how this was to be done, whether by party methods, or by communes and revolutionary societies, or some combination of these. These divisions had already appeared in the first phase of the International Revolutionary Wave between 1789 and 1795. They were to reappear in the future.

ii.         In the lead up to, and during the 1847-9 International Revolutionary Wave, a minority began to analyse the deeper contradictions in the emerging new society. They recognised the significance of the labour and capitalist divide, and not just the older monarchy/aristocracy and people divide. They realised that, unless the labour and capitalist divide, which provided the real underpinning of the new rising capitalist order, was transcended, then exploitation, oppression and alienation would be reconstituted in a new form. Wage slavery would replace earlier forms of exploitation. This is why they argued that capitalism’s social conditions would also need to be ended – hence the ‘social’ prefix to democracy. As understood in this sense, social democracy was synonymous with communism.

iii.        Despite the defeat of that vision, the 1847-9 International Revolutionary Wave still resulted in the end of feudalism and exclusive monarchical/aristocratic power in Europe and led to the further undermining of other tributary social systems in the world, e.g. in India, China, Japan, the Ottoman and Persian Empires. A massive expansion of capitalism took place, particularly in the leading imperial states – the UK, France, and later Prussia/Germany and USA. The consequent rise in living standards  for the majority contributed to the consolidation of parliamentary representative forms of government. Although there were still considerable democratic limitations and many living in destitution (as could be seen in the UK, France, Prussia/Germany and the USA), what had been understood to be democracy before – a republic based on the principle of the sovereignty of the people – became replaced with the much more limited concept of parliamentary democracy with an extended franchise, and the possibility of further economic and social reform.

iv.         In the leading imperial countries, the expansion of capitalist economic relations, particularly to industry, helped to create a new working class, the majority of whose living standards did improve. They now accepted this capitalist framework as given. In the UK, following the defeat of the social republican wing of the Chartists, new working class organisations appeared. These included the Model Trade Unions, which looked, not to  the ending of wage slavery, but to  ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’. Their members often also worked within the Radical, and later the Lib-Lab section of the Liberal Party to press for economic and social reforms and further extensions to the franchise.

v.          Nonconformist and other Christian influences also became more deeply rooted in the UK working class, leading to the marginalisation of freethinking and secularism. As the state’s remaining political and social restrictions on Nonconformism were removed, the leaders of these denominations began to have greater influence after their bourgeois members joined the British ruling class. (This process occurred more slowly for those from a Catholic or  Jewish background). A Christian cross-class social liberalism was promoted to undermine any independent working class thinking or organisation. Christian social liberalism could give its support to improved economic and social conditions for the working class. However, their working class tended to be the god-fearing, respectable and skilled, beyond whom lay the godless, non-respectable and unskilled. Christian thinking also  promoted a divide between men’s world of work and women’s domestic world. Rather than secular education, denominational schooling was increasingly accepted. In this way working class boys and girls could be more easily disciplined and prepared for their allotted role within capitalist society.

vi.          A more ecumenical, but still Christian wing of social liberalism emerged (indeed some would call themselves Christian socialists), which did hold to a vision of a new society; but one that would come about through the gradual evolutionary changes, as a projection of an almost inevitable ‘British road to progress’ under divine providence. This ‘British road to progress’ became useful to the British ruling class’s wider imperial aims. Indeed this could be exported, particularly to the white settler colonies.

vii.       Social liberalism had a major impact upon the British social democracy, which emerged from the 1880s. Whereas the earlier social democrats understood the need for a revolutionary democratic overthrow of the state, the ending of wage slavery, and the transformation of the world order, the new social democrats accepted the wages system, the existing UK state and the British Empire. Some even welcomed the attention and honours they received from monarchs, aristocrats and business leaders. Following the ruling class, they equated democracy with Westminster and the UK state. They looked for  further extensions of  the franchise and improved educational provision, so the working class could be ‘brought in from the cold’.

viii.       Soon, social democracy came to mean, in effect, social parliamentarianism, with an acceptance of such blatantly undemocratic features as the monarchy, House of Lords, Crown Powers, an established religion, and the unionist and imperialist suppression of national self-determination.  The growing acceptance of the legitimacy of such institutions and practices represented an extension of the newer social democratic acceptance of the anti-democratic features of the existing states in which they operated. The word ‘social’  began to appear before many other terms, e.g. monarchy, imperialism and patriotism.

ix.         Following this early shift in the understanding of social democracy, the main working class organisation, which emerged in the UK, the Independent Labour Party (ILP), was treated with some reservation by other social democrats in the orthodox Marxist-dominated Second International. The ILP was often pulled into political alliance with the Liberal Party, particularly when the latter became more overtly social liberal under Lloyd George’s New Liberalism. The ILP’s name did not proclaim its commitment to social democracy/socialism because the leadership thought that its ideal future society could be obtained by stealth, through the gradual reform of capitalism and Westminster under the existing UK constitution. Influenced by the Fabian Society and trade union leaders seeking only  improvements within the existing order, the ILP’s name did not include social democracy or socialism, because these still had revolutionary connotations and would scare off the social liberals, whose votes they were seeking.





xiv.       Thus, over quite an extended period of time, earlier in some states than others, depending on how well they were placed in the global pecking order, the term social democracy relinquished its onetime revolutionary democratic and internationalist connotations.




ii.          This International Revolutionary Wave produced some of the most advanced thinking, in regard to defining and putting emancipation, liberation and self-determination into practice, that has ever been witnessed. Even after its final crushing in 1923, there were continued eddies and ripples. As often happens following major defeats, these also took the form of cultural renaissance.


iv.         Furthermore, this process continued amongst many of the dissident sects, which left the Third International, after the crushing of the Kronstadt Rising in 1921; after the exile of Trotsky in 1928; and after 1956 following the CPSU revelations once Stalin had died. Official communism had become equated with a Party-state presiding over a nationalised economy. Many dissident communists whilst no longer accepting the legitimacy of the official Party running the state, still upheld the revolutionary nature of the nationalised property relations it was based on.

v.           For the official communists, a new global communist society would no longer come about through a revolutionary democratic extension of socialist republicanism wherever the exploited and oppressed had won power, but by an extension of a national state-based ‘socialisms in one country’. Internationalism increasingly took the form of unquestioning support for a Third International, which was subordinated to the interests the USSR Party-state. Wherever new Party-states were created these were meant to become part of the  new international socio-economic order created by the USSR. New international economic bodies like COMECON (1949) were set up. As long as the old imperialists still threatened, then the Warsaw Pact (1955) was meant to provide military defence.


vii.        The Party-states’ inability to deal with the National Question, even within their own borders, has been highlighted by the break-up Yugoslavia in 1990 and the USSR in 1991; and the continued national resistance in Tibet and Xinjiang to their incorporation within the Chinese state.



x.          Where, in the immediate context of 1916-23 International Revolutionary Wave, the working class became drawn into major class struggles, e.g. France and Italy, or into struggles facing the additional whip of competing state powers’ imperial oppression, e.g. Germany, then the infant Third International-affiliated communist parties threatened to replace the L&SI-affiliated social democratic parties. In France the PCF outgrew the SFIO. However, although growing in influence, until Hitler crushed all the opposition, the KPD did not overtake the SPD. Social democratic and official communist party competition continued. Sometimes, as in Great Britain, the Third International section, in this case the CPGB, whilst remaining a minority, related better than the social democrats to the most exploited and oppressed sections of the working class (e.g. Maerdy in South Wales, West Dunbartonshire’s Vale of Leven, the Fife coalfield, Chopwell in County Durham and East London).


xii.        Instead of building new unions or federations, or adopting an industrial republican approach and democratising the trade unions, the official communists pursued what was termed a Popular Frontist, or in its British trade union context a Broad Left approach. This involved allying with Left social democrats to replace the Right social democratic leaders of the existing trade unions, whilst largely leaving their bureaucratic structures intact. One of the weaknesses of this approach became evident, when new Broad Left candidates had to stand against old Broad Left officials, who had become bureaucratised in their outlook.

xiii.       However, it was the largely one-sided inter-imperialist competition, which emerged between the USA and the USSR in the Cold War period between 1947 and 1989  that  pushed official communism and a section of Left social democracy closer together. This had precedents in the pre-Second World War Popular Frontist politics, particularly Third International support for Leon Blum’s SFIO led French government (1936) and Juan Negrin’s PSOE participation in the Republican government of Spain (1936-9).

xiv.       During the Cold War, Right social democracy sided with the US state. Where any ‘Moscow’ sympathising Popular Frontism existed in national social democratic parties, trade unions and cultural organisations, the Right worked to break this connection. Every level of the US state was involved, including the CIA. What became known as an Atlanticist political orientation was promoted using US state funding, including money for US visits and other forms of ‘hospitality’. Against the Left, blacklisting and, political show trails were all resorted to in the USA and Western Europe; military coups elsewhere, including Greece in 1967.


xvi.       Many Left social democrats though aligned themselves with the official communists. In the UK, there was a lot of shared thinking in the British Road to Socialism (published under Stalin in 1951, with further revisions in 1952, 1958, 1968 and 1977). An indication of the linkage was the CPGB’s support for Left social democrat, Tony Benn’s Alternative Economic Strategy (AES)(1976) based on the promotion of neo-Keynesian economics. The Broad Left in the trade unions pushed the AES at the same time as  its key leaders, Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, accepted the Labour government’s Social Contract.

xvii.      The Third International proved to be more attractive to those living in states subjected to western imperialism. Here, as a result of the imperial control and distortion of their economies, the working class usually formed small minorities. So, the Third International affiliated parties sought to represent the interests of other oppressed classes, particularly the peasantry. It abandoned the notion of international democratic revolution in favour of the building of what it saw as the preconditions for socialism. This meant further capitalist development but on the basis of national state protectionism, and making economic deals with the USSR. Thus, the Third International extended its appeals in these countries to those who wanted to form a would-be state capitalist class.

xviii.     International competition took place on the basis of whether the US or the USSR backed models offered the best roads for national economic development. The USSR-backed model proved particularly attractive to those  who held to a top-down bureaucratic managerialist ethos. These people considered it the duty of the workers and peasants to make sacrifices for further national development. Such sacrifices were rarely demanded of the leaders, who after they came to power, usually enjoyed extensive privileges.

xix.       Therefore, the period between 1923 and 1975 saw a trend to a coalescence of Left social democracy and official communism. This involved no revolutionary democratic vision of emancipation, liberation and self-determination, but a shared, top-down managerialist concern for greater state promoted economic development. There were differences over the balance between the degree of state control, from complete nationalisation and state direction of the economy to nationalisation of key strategic sectors and  state regulation of the economy. Official state-backed orthodox marxism justified the first, social democratic neo-Keynesians the second. There could be some overlap between the two.




i.           Both social democracy and official communism reached the highpoint of their influence in the prolonged post war boom. Their decline was also linked. Transnational corporations were increasingly able to escape the restrictions of national states and developed global institutions, particularly in the financial sector, e.g. IMF, to pressurise existing states to bow to their needs. Following the new global economic crisis, which developed from the mid 1970s, Thatcher’s Tories and Reagan’s Republicans launched their neo-liberal offensive through the 1980s. This succeeded in reversing many earlier social democratic and official communist inspired reforms, and led to an increasing accommodation by these two groups to this rising neo-liberalism.

ii.          In accommodating to this latest form of capitalism, and the sacrifices it demanded of the working class, Right social democracy gained ascendancy over its Left and Centre predecessors in the West. This slide to Right social democracy took place throughout the western world. In New Zealand it was the Labour Party under Finance Minister, Roger Douglas, which actually initiated neo-liberal restructuring in 1984. It took the experience of Thatcher’s Tories and the defeat of the miners, before a new social neo-liberalism became more entrenched in the British Labour Party.

iii.         Eurocommunism had developed in Italy, Spain and elsewhere in the 1970s. Eurocommunism represented a more dissident strain in relation to official communism, until official communism itself adopted Perestroika and Glasnost in the USSR to prop up the state and economy. There were similar Eurocommunist style developments in several Warsaw Pact states, e.g. Poland and Hungary (but they were still restrained by a slower moving USSR which remained in overall control). Had the USSR been able to survive, a version of Eurocommunism might have become the new official communism. The fact that Eurocommunism, which increasingly accommodated to existing western capitalism, inspired Perestroika and Glasnost in the USSR, highlighted the growing ascendancy of Western style social democracy over Eastern official communism. This in turn was a product of the growing accommodation of social democracy to the neo-liberal offensive.

iv.          The Party-states had also been stagnating for sometime. Key sectors of their economy had become dysfunctional. This was reflected in their low productivity rates as working class resistance, under police state conditions, took the form of, ‘If they pretend to pay us, we’ll pretend to work’. Political battles within these states took place over the degree to which the dominant state protectionism should give way to a new engagement with the global economy, with further marketisation of the economy and the legalisation of already extensive black markets.

v.          When the Party-states collapsed, their successor states abandoned the state protectionism, which had shielded then from the direct impact of the global economy. The capitalist economic relations already latent in these states were able to firmly establish themselves. There was no need to mount a bloody counter-revolution such as occurred after the 1871 Paris Commune, in order to remove the working class from power. It was the Party-state bureaucrats who had wielded power, and not the working class. Many former bureaucrats got their hands on the state property they had previously managed and gained their privileges from. They launched a  neo-liberal assault on jobs, pay and welfare provision. These attacks were similar to, but more brutal than those that occurred in the West with the support of Right social democrats. The levels of state protectionism in the old USSR and Eastern Europe had been considerably greater and these had to be removed for neo-liberalism to take root, however drastic the social effects.


vii.         Official communism had led to a particular form of economic development with its simultaneous  exploitation and oppression of workers and peasants, and its increase in the provision of education and skills training needed to speed up industrialisation. Eventually, the living standards of the working class in the Party-states did rise during the global post-war boom. Official communism’s main advantage over social democracy was that it enjoyed official state backing. When this ended between 1989-91, the official communist model collapsed.



x.          After the experience of Tiananmen Square, Peking, in 1989, the Chinese CP leadership decided the Party-state would have to preside over the transition from a heavily protectionist to a turbo-capitalist economy within the new world order. Under the CPC’s continued political domination, a new powerful capitalist class began to grow rapidly. The CPC opened up Special Economic Zones to transnational corporations, with the intention of massively increasing exports and to gain access to global financial markets in order to further investment. This created a new working class in the most advanced sectors of the global economy.

xi.         However, the attacks on welfare in China were even more draconian, the super-exploitation of labour even harsher, with internal controls over labour movement as brutal as much of the cross-border movement of labour to the EU and the USA. A segmented labour force was created, with an ever decreasing proportion being protected by the ‘Iron Bowl’, and an increasing proportion being dependent on balancing their existence between resort to precarious urban industrial employment and whatever support they could get from the rural communities they came from. Land in these communities has often been sold illegally, with the connivance of corrupt party officials, further weakening the working class, still dependent on subsistence produce and incomes from the rural villages. And beyond this there is an extensive semi-legal and black economy where ‘illegals’ are employed, including North Koreans fleeing repression.

xii.        Meanwhile, a further shift occurred in the meaning of social democracy under the Right. In the UK, the Labour Party first accommodated to the rise of Thatcher through the ‘dented shield’ policy of Centre social democrats under Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and John Smith. After the defeat of the Miners’ Strike though, the political trajectory moved relentlessly further Right, until Tony Blair emerged as leader of New Labour. He ditched the Old Labour, Centre and Left social democratic Clause 4 pretensions.


xiv.       Tony Blair, fully taking on board the earlier political degeneration of the term social democracy, went on to describe himself as a ‘social-ist’. This concept meant putting the word ‘social’, not only before democracy, by which he meant Westminster; but monarchy, hence his suggestion of the ‘Peoples Princess’; neo-liberalism, by which some of elite’s wealth might trickle down to the minions. As a social  imperialist  he took the UK into war with Iraq, by such ‘democratic’ means as sanctioning covert military actions before the war was officially declared, the use of the ‘Dodgy Dossier’, the sacking of journalist Andrew Gilligan from the BBC, and the ‘suicide’ of weapons expert, David Kelly.


xvi.       Right social democracy’s abandonment of any commitment to the state other than to maximise the opportunities for corporate profitabilty in its particular national ‘branch’ of the global economy; to any particular commitment to the working class other than as individual consumers; to democracy other than the existing UK state and the use of focus groups to help make policy, led to the ditching of even the remotest prospect of a reformist alternative to existing society. Right social democracy  bought heavily into TINA, offering nothing more than ‘neo-liberalism with a human face’.

xvii.      Thus, instead of leading workers along their ‘national roads to socialism’, social democracy and official communism has dragged them into the dead end of neo-liberal integration into the world economy.


e.        From social liberalism to populism


ii.         Populism can take root after particular defeats, in the context of the disintegration of class organisations – whether older social democratic, official communist or independent – which had previously provided the basis for gaining reforms or for resistance. Populism, instead of uniting workers and promoting class confidence from their own collective experience and organisation, turns to atomised individuals who look for saviours and scapegoats. They still crave collective identities – but these begin to take other alienated forms – nationalist, ethnic, ethno-religious, racist and male chauvinist – which break-up working class unity. Furthermore, the lack of an organised class-conscious pole of attraction means populism can oscillate between Left and Right.





vii.         Putin’s most consistent overtures have been to the Far Right in Europe – Golden Dawn in Greece, Attak in Bulgaria, Jobbik in Hungary, Northern League in Italy and Front National in France. He has recognised fellow Right populists in Farage and Trump. However, the Russian state-backed Russia Today in the UK is more designed to appeal to Left populists. Some overtures, like his attempt to woo the SNP led government in Scotland have not worked because, although Scottish independence was opposed between 2012-14 by the UK, US governments and leading EU bureaucrats, the SNP has remained Atlanticist and become openly pro-NATO and is pro-EU. Putin and his oligarchic backers see the EU as an economic threat to Russian interests, and its lack of an independent military force, as making it subordinate to NATO’s policy of encirclement of the Russian Federation.


ix.        In 2008, following the Crash, Alan Greenspan, Chair of the US Federal Reserve and arch-advocate of finance capital-led neo-liberalism declared, “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact [ii]“. Traditionally, it has been thought that it would be the Left that would highlight and taking advantage of any major crisis of the capitalist system. However, one effect of a serious crisis is to provide new opportunities for some capitalists – “Never let a good crisis go to waste”.

x.         When the post 2007/8 economic crisis hit the EU, the Troika (IMF, European Central Bank-ECB and European Commission – EC) resorted to an updated version of the Structural Adjustment Programmes previously imposed upon the ‘Third World’. In the EU, they demanded that the exploited and oppressed should pay the banksters’ debts. In the process, the EU’s southern tier – Greece, Italy, Spain to Portugal, plus Ireland (which was done over by both the EU and The City) – were the worst hit.














xxiv.     Too much focus, though, on the role of the hard Right can draw attention away from the fact it was the economic conditions and hyper-individualism promoted under neo-liberalism that allowed this new political phenomenon to grow. No matter how unsavoury Trump’s ‘America First’ appeared to the Old Guard of Democrats and Republicans, he represents a ‘blowback’ consequence of their own neo-liberalism.

xxv.      Trump’s supporters also saw Brexit as a possible dry run for their US ambitions. Thus Robert Mercer, hedge fund billionaire and co-owner of Breitbart, provided free backing for Nigel Farage [xi]. But one-time City trader, Farage did not have the same economic muscle as Trump, and only had the support of a few wealthy business figures, like Arron Banks. But Brexit also had another parallel campaign, with far more significant backers in the Tory Right. Once the vote for Brexit had been won, Trump would go on to his own “Brexit, plus, plus, plus” victory. Having seen Theresa May adopt Brexit, he tried to get her to make Farage the UK ambassador to the US. The British ruling class could accept the Tories donning much of UKIP’s clothes, but not its erratic leader or its other prominent and unpredictable figures. Trump could see the lie of the land and got May to meet him in the Oval Office, to plan for his ‘America First’ US-UK ‘free trade’ deal.




xxix.     Furthermore, the UK state, which the British Left social democrats hold to be the vehicle for their neo-Keynesian reforms, has been developed over the centuries to best meet the interests of the few and not the many. The Crown Powers serve the British ruling class. This is why any sustainable challenge to the existing global corporate order, and its local centres of accumulated power, involves the development of a party and international advocating revolutionary democracy and independent working class organisation.







[iv]    ibid.

[v]     ibid.


[vii]   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarsya









  2. RCN says:

    A comment on dvi – ‘Chicago Boys or ‘Harvard Boys’?

    The “shock therapy” of the former Soviet bloc, and formation of the Russian federation was carried out under the administration of President Boris Yeltsin. Directing privatization however, was deputy prime minister for economic and financial policy, Anatoly Chubais, who The New York Times once referred to as “the most despised man in Russia.”

    Cozy with the U.S. Clinton administration, Chubais was instrumental in giving control of Russia’s economic policy to the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), which had originally arisen out of the Harvard Center for International Affairs, founded by Henry Kissinger and known for its close relationship with the CIA and FBI. In the 1990s, the HIID consisted of an ideologically driven group of economists eager to apply their neoliberal credentials to what was once the world’s then largest socialist economy.

    The sale of Russia was first devised in a villa outside Moscow in the final years of the Soviet Union, when Harvard economist and HIID director Jeffrey Sachs met with Chubais and a small pro-Yeltsin clique. The team devised their plan to eliminate nearly all price controls and subsidies, and privatize all key industries in a very short time-span.

    Later, at Chubais’ urging following the dissolution of the Union, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, was tasked with the “reform” of the fledgling Federation’s economy, and delegated that authority to the HIID.

    And so it came to be that a few Harvard professors, at the behest of USAID, became the architects of post-Soviet Russia.

    The “Harvard Boys,” as they came to be known as (perhaps a play off of the “Chicago Boys” that privatized Chile), included “shock therapy” theorist Jeffrey Sachs, former World Bank Chief Economist Lawrence Summers, and Harvard economists Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay.

    Hay and Shleifer would later be fired and sued for using USAID money for personal gain. In spite of the scandal, Shleifer teaches economics at Harvard to this day.

    Shock therapy proved to be a “shock” indeed. Commodity prices went up by 2,500 percent within a single year due to hyperinflation. Although the inflation stabled out (temporarily), the damage was done, and numerous people had been pushed into poverty, while an oligarch class was rising to wealth and power.

    Chubais implemented a voucher program to alleviate the worst of privatization, originally conceived of in an academic paper by Shleifer. The program entailed providing a “voucher” of roughly 10,000 ruble shares in formerly public companies to each citizen. However, the fact that the most profitable industries, including oil, gas, and metal, were excluded from the program, paired with extremely high inflation, quickly led to the vouchers becoming worthless.

    Financial scams involving the vouchers quickly further complicated the program, leading many to sell off their “shares” for practically nothing, getting perhaps a bottle of Vodka or some groceries in exchange.

    Chubais and the HIID were able to operate by using foreign money to establish private, non-governmental organizations that could bypass parliament, most notably the Russian Privatization Center, which carried out government policy and directed privatization processes. It had the power and authority of a government agency, but was not accountable to parliament or officials, being run directly by Chubais and the Harvard Boys. Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into Russia from USAID, the World Bank, and the European Union, to prop up the NGOs carrying out privatization.

    Western aid money provided the funds to construct an oligarchy. Quoted in a 1998 report by The Nation, the USAID coordinator for the former Soviet Union, Richard Morningstar, admits this: “If we hadn’t been there to provide funding to Chubais, could we have won the battle to carry out privatization? Probably not.”

    By the end of Yeltsin’s first term, Yeltsin’s popularity had plummeted to the single digits, and Chubais and his clan were implicated in a massive corruption scandal for awarding bribes and privileges and using funds for personal profit. Yeltsin in response, fired several officials, but still kept Chubais on, claiming his departure would “destabilize the situation.”

    from – https://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/How-the-United-States-Hacked-Russias-Elections-in-the-1990s-20180316-0003.html

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